Cashman: "There’s certainly failure on our part as an organization"

“I’m surprised that we as an organization are in this position,” he said. “I’ll leave it at that.”

Kind of a strange situation for the Yankees, who said – one after another – that they’d talked to Pineda after his previous Red Sox start, when he quite obviously had pine tar on the palm of his hand. What they talked about isn’t entirely clear – whether they told him to stop using it or simply hide it better – but it’s clear that they didn’t expect Pineda to walk to the mound in last night’s second inning with an obvious bunch of gunk on his neck.

“There have been enough conversations,” Cashman said. “And obviously there will be more now, or there have already been more now, even in-game when he was ejected from the game. I think after the last go-around with the same team, clearly there were a lot of conversations about this. There are no secrets there.”

It seems Pineda simply thought pine tar would be seen as acceptable, even if everyone knew what was going on.

“I’m not sure that he understood the implications,” pitching coach Larry Rothschild said. “And I think it was more in his mind that he needed to grip the baseball, whatever he had to do. I’m not sure if he thought there’d be an understanding of it, but it’s one of those things where I’m not sure he understood what the penalties were, even though I had told him what could happen. I think in his mind, he needed to grip the baseball. I think he probably said it, but if he didn’t, I’ll say it, he didn’t want to hurt anybody. When it’s cold out, and windy, those balls are like cue balls, and it makes it really tough. Look, he’s not doing anything to try to change things and get a hitter out: scuffing the ball, using Vaseline or anything like that. It was strictly what he said, and that’s trying to get a better grip on the baseball.”

Cashman said it was an organizational misstep. He made it clear that Pineda, and Pineda alone, decided to apply and use the pine tar, but Cashman said there was clearly some sort of internal breakdown that led Pineda to believe he could get away such a blatant action.

And because of that, now the Yankees are going to be without yet another starting pitcher.

“We certainly are responsible, and there’s certainly failure on our part as an organization as a whole that he took the field in the second inning with that on his neck,” Cashman said. “He’s responsible for his actions, but we failed as an organization for somehow him being in that position. I don’t know how, none of us right now (knows how it happened). We’re scratching our head right now, how that took place.”